Replay: Classic Modern Drama Reimagined spans over a century of great theatre to explore how iconic plays have been adapted and versioned by later writers to reflect or dissect the contemporary zeitgeist. Starting with A Doll's House, Ibsen's much-reprised masterpiece of marital relations from 1879, Toby Zinman explores what made the play so controversial and shocking in its day before tracing how later reimaginings have reworked Ibsen's original. The spine of plays then includes such landmark works as Strindberg's Miss Julie, Oscar Wilde's comic The Importance of Being Earnest, Chekhov's Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya, Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, the Rattigan centenary revivals, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, ultimately arriving at Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Taking each modern play as the starting point, Zinman explores the diverse renderings and reworkings by subsequent playwrights and artists –including prominent directors and their controversial productions as well as acknowledging reworkings in film, opera and ballet.Through the course of this groundbreaking study we discover not only how theatrical styles have changed but how society's attitude towards politics, religion, money, gender, sexuality and race have radically altered over the course of the century. In turn Replay reveals how theatre can serve as both a reflection of our times and a provocation to them.

Readers and acolytes of the vital early 1950s-mid 1960s writers known as the Beat Generation tend to be familiar with the prose and poetry by the seminal authors of this period: Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima, and many others. Yet all of these authors, as well as other less well-known Beat figures, also wrote plays-and these, together with their countercultural approaches to what could or should happen in the theatre-shaped the dramatic experiments of the playwrights who came after them, from Sam Shepard to Maria Irene Fornes, to the many vanguard performance artists of the seventies. This volume, the first of its kind, gathers essays about the exciting work in drama and performance by and about the Beat Generation, ranging from the well-known Beat figures such as Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, to the “Afro-Beats” - LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Bob Kaufman, and others. It offers original studies of the women Beats - Di Prima, Bunny Lang - as well as groups like the Living Theater who in this era first challenged the literal and physical boundaries of the performance space itself.

Is postdramatic theatre political and if so how? How does it relate to Brecht's ideas of political theatre, for example? How can we account for the relationship between aesthetics and politics in new forms of theatre, playwriting, and performance? The chapters in this book discuss crucial aspects of the issues raised by the postdramatic turn in theatre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: the status of the audience and modes of spectatorship in postdramatic theatre; the political claims of postdramatic theatre; postdramatic theatre's ongoing relationship with the dramatic tradition; its dialectical qualities, or its eschewing of the dialectic; questions of representation and the real in theatre; the role of bodies, perception, appearance and theatricality in postdramatic theatre; as well as subjectivity and agency in postdramatic theatre, dance and performance. Offering analyses of a wide range of international performance examples, scholars in this volume engage with Hans-Thies Lehmann's theoretical positions both affirmatively and critically, relating them to other approaches by thinkers ranging from early theorists such as Brecht, Adorno and Benjamin, to contemporary thinkers such as Fischer-Lichte, Rancière and others

Theatre in the Expanded Field is a fiercely original, bold and daring exploration of the fields of theatre and performance studies and the received narratives and histories that underpin them. Rich with interdisciplinary reference, international, eclectic and broad-ranging in its examples, it offers readers a compelling and provocative reassessment of the disciplines, one that spans pre-history to the present day. Sixty years ago, in 1962, Richard Southern wrote a remarkable book called The Seven Ages of the Theatre. It was unusual in its time for taking a trans-disciplinary, new-historical and avowedly internationalist approach to its subject - nothing less than a totalizing view of its field. Theatre in the Expanded Field does not attempt to mimic Southern's work but rather takes his spirit of adventure and ambition as its frame for the contemporary moment of performance and its diverse pasts. Identifying seven ways of exploring the performance field, from pre-history to postdramatic theatre the book presents studies of both contemporary and historical works not as a chronological succession, but in keeping with their coeval qualities, as movements or 'generations' of connection and interaction, dissensus and interruption. It does this with the same purpose as Richard Southern's original work: to provide for the planning of responsive performance spaces 'now'. Illustrated throughout with line-drawings, Theatre in the Expanded Field is as richly rewarding as it is ambitious and expansive in it vision.

Several scholarly fields investigate the reuse of source texts, most relevantly adaptation studies and fanfiction studies. The limitation of these two fields is that adaptation studies focuses narrowly on retelling, usually in the form of film adaptations, but is not as well equipped to treat other uses of source material like prequels, sequels, and spinoffs. On the other hand, fanfiction studies has the broad reach adaptation studies lacks but is generally interested in "underground" production rather than material that goes through the official publication process and thus enters the literary canon. This book sits in the gap between these fields, discussing published novels and their contribution to the scholarly engagement with their pre- and early modern source material as well as applying that creative framework to the teaching of literature in the college classroom.

The volume reveals an astonishing richness in the theatrical approaches to Ibsen across the world: it considers political theatre, institutional 'high art', theatre for development, queer and transgender theatre, Brechtian techniques, puppetry, post-dramatic theatre, rural village performance and avant-garde touring companies. Investigating varied renegotiations of his drama, including the work of Thomas Ostermeier in Germany and other parts of the world, versions of A Doll's House from Chile and China, The Wild Duck in Iran and productions of Peer Gynt in Zimbabwe and Egypt, Frode Helland provides a deeper understanding of a cross-cultural Ibsen. The volume gives an in-depth analysis of the practice of Ibsen in relation to political, social, ideological and economic forces within and outside of the performances themselves, and demonstrates the incredible diversity of his work in local situations.

This book argues that African American theatre in the twentieth century represented a cultural front of the civil rights movement. Highlighting the frequently ignored decades of the 1940s and 1950s, Burrell documents a radical cohort of theatre artists who became critical players in the fight for civil rights both onstage and offstage, between the Popular Front and the Black Arts Movement periods. The Civil Rights Theatre Movement recovers knowledge of little-known groups like the Negro Playwrights Company and reconsiders Broadway hits including Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, showing how theatre artists staged radically innovative performances that protested Jim Crow and U.S. imperialism amidst a repressive Cold War atmosphere. By conceiving of class and gender as intertwining aspects of racism, this book reveals how civil rights theatre artists challenged audiences to reimagine the fundamental character of American democracy.

Justice Performed: Courtroom TV Shows and the Theaters of Popular Law is the first study of the reality TV genre to trace its theatrical legacy, connecting the phenomenon of the daytime TV shows to a long history of theatrical trials staged to educate audiences in pedagogies of citizenship. It examines how judge TV fulfills part of law's performative function: that of providing a participatory spectacle the public can recognize as justice. Since it debuted in 1981 with The People's Court, which made famous its star jurist, Judge Joseph A. Wapner, dozens of judges have made the move to television. Unlike the demographics in actual courts, most TV judges are non-white men and women hailing from diverse cultural and racial backgrounds. These judges charge their decisions with personal preferences and cultural innuendos, painting a very different picture of what justice looks like. Drawing on interviews with TV judges, producers and production staff, as well as the author's experience as a studio audience member, the book scrutinizes the performativity of the genre, the needs it meets and the inherent ideological biases about race, gender and civic instruction.

Dramaturgy in the Making maps contemporary dramaturgical practices in various settings of theatre-making and dance to reveal the different ways that dramaturgs work today. It provides a thorough survey of three major areas of practice - institutional dramaturgy, production dramaturgy and dance dramaturgy - with each illustrated through a range of case studies that illuminate methodology and which will assist practitioners in developing their own 'dramaturgical toolbox'. In tracing the development of the role of the dramaturg, the author explores the contribution of Lessing, Brecht and Tynan, foundational figures who shaped the practice. She excavates the historical and theoretical contexts for each strand of the work, uniquely offering a history of dance dramaturgy and its associated theories. Based on extensive research, the volume features material from the author's interviews with fifty eminent professionals from Europe and North America, including: Robert Blacker, Jack Bradley, DD Kugler, Ruth Little and Hildegard De Vuyst. Through these, a detailed and precise insight is provided into dramaturgical processes at organisations such as the Akram Khan Company, les ballets C de la B (Gent), the National Theatre and the Royal Court (London), the Schaubühne (Berlin) and The Sundance Institute Theatre Lab (Utah), among others. Dramaturgy in the Making will prove indispensable to anyone working in theatre or wanting to better understand the dramaturgical processes in performance-making today. The book features a foreword by Geoff Proehl, author of Toward a Dramaturgical Sensibility: Landscape and Journey.

Toby Zinman spans over a century of great theatre to explore how iconic plays have been adapted and versioned by later writers to reflect or dissect the contemporary zeitgeist.